Plastic film bags are widely used in retail sales, supermarkets, and other similar applications to store and carry items such as goods purchased by consumers. Due to the various beneficial qualities of plastic bags, many retailers have switched from using paper bags to using plastic bags. While plastic bags provide durable, economic, and aesthetically pleasing alternatives to paper bags, an ongoing problem has been how to conveniently and efficiently package and dispense the plastic bags. In particular, adjacent plastic bags exhibit very little friction between one another and thus tend to slide relatively easily over one another when provided in a stack. Accordingly, plastic bags do not tend to stack well, either horizontally or vertically without requiring additional support. In this sense, the stack direction (horizontal, vertical) refers to the direction normal to the plane of a flat bag. To address this stacking problem, various dispensers have been developed. For example, some prior dispensers utilize various retaining fixtures, such as hanger rods or staples, to help secure and support plastic bags within the dispenser. These additional fixtures increase complexity of the dispensers and generally increase the cost of the dispensers such that the economic benefit of using plastic bags is diminished. Some prior dispensers are also bulky, making it difficult to transport and store the dispensers prior to filling them with plastic bags.
Another problem associated with dispensing plastic bags is that plastic bags are generally unable to be oriented in an upstanding fashion (a horizontal stack) due to the inherent low stiffness/rigidity of the plastic film material used to form the bags. Even when they are provided in a dispenser, plastic bags tend to settle toward the bottom of the dispenser after several bags have been initially removed from the dispenser. This settling makes removal of the bags from the dispenser difficult.
There is thus a need for an improved dispenser for dispensing plastic bags which overcomes drawbacks of the prior art, such as those discussed above.